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Despite Chipzilla's vain attempts to hide the value for money differential between the Celeron and Pentium II ranges highlighted in our original RegMark™ benchmarks - including this week axing the entire PII range - we can exclusively reveal that little Celeron continues to be a thorn in Intel's side as it continues to munch dollars from the chip behemoth's bottom line. The flagship Pentium III does indeed offer superior performance over Celeron, especially in the MultimediaMark 99 and CPUMark99 benchmarks, but PIII floating point performance is way down on the cheapo chip due to Celeron's on-die L2 cache running at full core speed. The original RegMark™ index only took FPU performance and price into consideration, so in The Register's fine tradition of fair play, we have now included an additional two parameters into the all-new RegMark99™ tests - MultimediaMark 99 and CPUmark 99 - in a bid to give a more accurate price/performance comparison. Chipzilla still makes it hard to find comparative performance details for its two ranges of desktop CPUs, but the numbers are there on the Intel website if you know where to look. So welcome, please, the all-new RegMark99™ Bangs-Per-Buck index, calculated by the simple method of dividing the sum of the three benchmarks by the price of the chip.

Processor

Price/1000

FPUmark99

Multimediamark99

CPUmark99

Total

RegMark99™

PIII/500

$423

2540

1563

38.2

4141.2

9.79

Celeron/500

$167

2660

1128

36.4

3824.4

22.90

So far from going away, our new price/performance index shows that the Celeron threat to Chipzilla's bottom line is still very much in evidence - Celeron 500 delivers over 2.5 times as many bangs per buck as the Pentium III at the same speed. And remember that Intel needs to flog high-margin PIIIs to make any profit. Celeron margins are very, very small. And don't forget there's a Celeron 500 due before the end of the year using the 100MHz FSB currently used by the P3, so Celeron will be even better value for money. Good news for users, not so clever for Chipzilla's bottom line. ®